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Nuclear power plant technicians, senior military officers, FBI contractors and an employee of “a highly-secretive Department of Defense agency” with a Top Secret clearance. Those are just a few of the more than 100 people with sensitive military and government connections that law enforcement is tracking because they are linked to “outlaw motorcycle gangs.”

A year before the deadly Texas shootout that killed nine people on May 17, a lengthy report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives detailed the involvement of U.S. military personnel and government employees in outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs. A copy of the report was obtained by The Intercept.

The report lays out, in almost obsessive detail, the extent to which OMG members are represented in nearly every part of the military, and in federal and local government, from police and fire departments to state utility agencies. Specific examples from the report include dozens of Defense Department contractors with Secret or Top Secret clearances; multiple FBI contractors; radiological technicians with security clearances; U.S. Department of Homeland Security employees; Army, Navy and Air Force active-duty personnel, including from the special operations force community; and police officers.

If this is true. Fuck them and their ‘careers’ they can go from wanna-be-Hells-Belles, to full time scum.

“For city/state/federal prosecutors the change must be their mindset of ‘win at all cost’. The law is not a game to keep score and further your career. “

Prosecutorial and police misconduct are often dismissed as just a few bad apples doing a few bad apple-ish things. But what happens when it’s entrenched and systemic and goes unchecked for years? That looks to be the case in Orange County, California, where the situation got so completely out of hand this spring that Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals issued an order disqualifying the entire Orange County District Attorney’s Office (that’s all 250 prosecutors) from continuing to prosecute a major death penalty case.

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In an explosive moment following a hearing last year, Sanders revealed that the Orange County Sheriffs Department has maintained a massive, secret, 25-year-old computerized record-keeping system called TRED. These TRED documents were full of potentially exculpatory data, but the agency officials had systematically refused to turn any of them over, or even acknowledge their very existence, to defense counsel.

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What is this ‘mentality’? Without bogging down into the history of US Naval Aviation’s (needed) ‘Come To Jesus Meeting’, US Carrier Pilots had developed a sense of entitlement: That they were an elite, small cadre, with command-inspired esprit-de-corps, doing a dangerous job, fighting for justice against the bad guys, that the officer on the line ‘knew what was going on’ and how to do the job. “Old-guys” ‘flying desks’ did not know what was really happening.

Outside advice and unwanted intrusions to the units were dismissed and discounted. Officers of the line banded together with unofficial codes of conduct to protect the group. These ideas and actions are corrosive and the Navy instituted a systemic change, to correct these problems.

We should be ecstatic there is not a single-point National Police Command that would bring change to police forces like the Navy/DoD was able to enact. This would be a very different country with a singular police command and I never want to see that happen in the United States. Using the word “Police” is referring to all US law enforcement agencies—Federal, State, Local. As seen in the news lately Federal enforcement are having internal problems with discipline and integrity. This is not an indictment of all officers, agents, departments, and agencies. This is a general public perceptions and public relations problem.

Except for the Feds, it will not and cannot come from Washington. ‘Proclamations from High’ would be in form of a written notice/paper that would be read, acknowledged and initialed by each officer, placed in their admin jacket and promptly forgotten. Even for the Federal agencies the same boilerplate would be followed/filed/forgotten.

How to make the changes to all these departments?

On the city/town level the city leaders have to change their mindset of using police officers as revenue generators/tax collectors for city coffers. This is not just a small town issue of parking tickets, expired plates, licenses. Teaming with federal agencies allows agencies to ‘arrest’ someone’s money (and split it 80/20 with the Feds) declare the monies/property guilty, hold an administrative hearing, find the property guilty and take it. Even without the properties’ owner being charged with a crime. This creates a perverse incentive for the cities to continue to act in this repugnant (to the Constitution) manner. If your city budget will not support all of those AFSCME administrative drones it is time to cut back on ‘guaranteed’ city jobs.

Taxpayers, this is where your say (vote) comes in to play. It is time to pay attention to the bloat in the Courthouse. With less ‘professional administrators’ to support, funding for policing duties and efforts can be adjusted to concentrate on front-line safety-of-the-public issues.

For city/state/federal prosecutors the change must be their mindset of ‘win at all cost’. The law is not a game to keep score and further your career. This leads to unsaid collusion with officers to NOT “tell the truth, the whole truth, so help me god.” The must win mentality is destructive, causing prosecutors to expect (if not demand) that the police always be on the side of the state.

For police departments and Field Office levels the change will only come though committed Leadership. Not though any management principals—Leadership. There is a difference and it does matter. These leaders must obligate themselves to changing the mindset of the officers they command. If the command hierarchy will not change, the city/town/taxpayers must demand new leadership.

Once the institutional conversion begins it will take consistent actions and words to make the officers on the line understand that the old order of business is not acceptable. Individual officers should not have to be afraid of speaking out to curtail egregious and illegal behaviors. Even as simple as, ‘The guy is in handcuffs you should stop hitting him now.’ These ideas of common sense, of restraint when danger to the officer(s) is no longer a factor, are missing from many police departments. The impression to the pubic of, “I don’t take no lip, with this cannon on my hip.” has to end. Yes it is a cliché, but generalizations do not appear out of a vacuum.

Not demanding change to these problems, though leadership, will cost the taxpayer’s money; directly, though lawsuits against rogue officers/Departments and indirectly from mob violence and riots. Cities, States and Federal law enforcement that do not effect these much needed changes in leadership will find their officers continuing to act in a manner that is detrimental to the public good and public opinion.

If your citizens do not support the police, are afraid of the police, and do not respect the police–officers on the line will continue to think “Us vs. Them” and will not support, respect and defend the constitutional rights of the citizens.

Next door in Venezuela the economic situation is so bad that the government will no longer reveal key economic statistics. The government has also bought or shut down most privately owned mass media. But the bad news still gets around, just not as quickly. It appears that inflation is now over 200 percent and unemployment over 20 percent, with underemployment (mainly of people with government make-work jobs) even higher. Food shortages are getting worse, in large part because Venezuela imports most of its food and those imports are down by nearly half compared to a year ago. That’s because the world price for oil is down by half and the government simply does not have the money. No one is willing to lend either, because Venezuela already has lots of foreign debt and some of it looks like it won’t get paid back.

“Civil asset forfeiture leads government to exceed its just powers over the governed. It encourages law enforcement to take short cuts. Rather than prosecute or even arrest, civil asset forfeiture enables law enforcement to seize property without any proof of wrongdoing. And the process creates perverse incentives,” Grassley said in his opening statement. “When this occurs without pursuing a criminal conviction, or even an arrest, the chances rise that the rights of innocent people will be violated.”

I guess all violent and property crimes have been solved In Garden City. Taxpayers there can rejoice.

This boy was defending his mother’s use of a drug that helps her deal with an awful condition. Because he stuck up for his mother, the state arrested her and ripped him away from her. Even if he is eventually returned to his mother (as he ought to be), the school, the town, and the state of Kansas have already done a lot more damage to this kid than Banda’s use of pot to treat her Crohn’s disease ever could.

With legal reasoning reminiscent of Catch-22, the court ruled that Brewer “failed to make a prima facie showing of gross disproportionality,” since he “presented no evidence regarding the amount of the fine in relation to the crime it is designed to punish,” even though Brewer had not been charged with any crime that he could be punished with. (Adding to the absurdity, Brewer was not even the defendant in the forfeiture case. His cash was. In civil forfeiture cases, the government sues the property, not its owner.)
Moreover, the seizure appears to have circumvented Nebraska law. Even though a Nebraska deputy seized the cash, after the seizure, the Sheriff’s Office turned the case over to the Drug Enforcement Administration to begin federal forfeiture proceedings. Under a program called equitable sharing, police can transfer seized property to a federal agency and take property under federal law. This allows law enforcement to bypass tougher restrictions set by state law.
A 2010 report by the Institute for Justice found that Nebraska is one of just three states that impose the same high evidentiary standard (beyond a reasonable doubt) on the government in both criminal prosecutions and civil forfeiture proceedings. But for federal forfeiture cases, prosecutors need only show that the property was more likely than not used in connection with a crime—a much easier burden to meet. Moreover, equitable sharing lets local and state law enforcement to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of forfeited property; Nebraska state law allows 75 percent.
Douglas County, Neb. is particularly aggressive in pursuing forfeiture. According to The Washington Post, without obtaining warrants or indictments, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office seized and kept $11.5 million in equitable sharing funds since 9/11, one of the highest totals in the nation.

How? Simple. Give the police near-total immunity for their behavior as “public servants,” instruct them to bring in money by just about any means necessary, rely on the conservatives to support almost any excess, enjoy the blessing of the state and federal courts, and provide them with enough weapons — not just guns, but tasers, nightsticks, huge flashlights, etc. — to take down and out anyone who resists. We can sort out guilt or innocence later, possibly posthumously. Joseph K. had a better chance at justice in Frank Kafka’s The Trial.

Border Patrol agents’ bad behavior—not just at the international boundary but at checkpoints as much as 100 court-endorsed miles away within the “Constitution-free zone”—is easy to document both because it’s so damned common, and because of the willingness of some brave souls to record their encounters and post the results online. Terry Bressi, a University of Arizona staff engineer, is something of a pioneer in the field of documenting encounters with armed and abusive federal agents. When Reason TV interviewed him in 2013, he’d already recorded over 300 such meet-and-greets. Maybe his example inspired others, or perhaps the impossibility of transiting many roads and communities, especially in the Southwest, without being stopped by Border Patrol made responses inevitable. The Houston Chronicle reports that there’s a growing surge of Americans recording themselves asserting their rights to ill-behaved federal thugs.

Given all of that, I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to serving search warrants for drug crimes, there is no Castle Doctrine, there is no knock-and-announce requirement and there’s barely still a Fourth Amendment at all.

“Although some of the DEA agents participating in these parties denied it, the information in the case file suggested they should have known the prostitutes in attendance were paid with cartel funds. A foreign officer also alleged providing protection for the DEA agents’ weapons and property during the parties,” the report said. “The foreign officers further alleged that in addition to soliciting prostitutes, three DEA SSAs [special agents] in particular were provided money, expensive gifts, and weapons from drug cartel members.”

And what kind of SEVERE penalty did the DEA bring to bear on these ‘agents’?

Ten DEA agents later admitted attending the parties, and some of the agents received suspensions of between two to 10 days.

A panel appointed by Virginia’s governor to examine the state Alcoholic Beverage Control Department’s law enforcement activities is set to conduct its first meeting.
The 20-member review panel chaired by Secretary of Public Safety Brian Moran convenes Monday afternoon at the state Capitol.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe created the panel after a public uproar over an ABC agent’s arrest of a University of Virginia student last month. The student, Martese Johnson, needed 10 stitches to close a gash on his head. Photos and video of the arrest were widely distributed on social media.

An arrest that left a University of Virginia student bloodied and shouting allegations of racism has prompted some lawmakers to question whether state liquor control agents should have the power to arrest people.
Gov. Terry McAuliffe ordered the Virginia State Police to investigate the early Wednesday arrest of Martese Johnson, who needed 10 stitches to close a gash on his head after his altercation with Alcoholic Beverage Control agents outside a Charlottesville bar. State police said that “administrative review” will be conducted along with a criminal investigation requested by the Charlottesville prosecutor.

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The Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is going to college campuses around the state to talk to students and others about preventing alcohol and drug abuse.

Here, Obama ought to know better. Even if he didn’t read the Department of Justice’s report on Ferguson, surely he read the news stories about it. In Ferguson, there are almost as many arrest warrants as there are residents. No shit. Many of these warrants—how many is not made clear by the DOJ—are for minor traffic infractions. The arrest warrants are largely a product of the police department being used as a revenue collection agency. This is important. A number of the arrest warrants in Ferguson are presumably also for drugs, even for “nonviolent drug offenders.” In other jurisdictions, marijuana decriminalization is coupled with new fines for possession, revealing how the drug war, too, is in part a revenue collection exercise.
Keeping marijuana criminalized because people like Barack Obama—rich, affluent elites who have admitted to drug use in their youth—don’t think the rest of us can handle making decisions about our bodies also creates ample opportunity for constitutional rights violations.

Keeping marijuana criminalized because people like Barack Obama—rich, affluent elites who have admitted to drug use in their youth—don’t think the rest of us can handle making decisions about our bodies also creates ample opportunity for constitutional rights violations.

Their son remains out of school — he’s due to return Monday on strict probation. But in the meantime, the events of the past six months have wreaked havoc on the formerly happy-go-lucky boy’s psyche. His parents say he’s withdrawn socially, and is now under the care of a pediatric psychiatrist for panic attacks and depression.
The couple — both are schoolteachers — have filed a federal lawsuit against Bedford County Schools and the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office. It refers to their son only by the initials R.M.B.
It alleges Bedford Middle School Assistant Principal Brian Wilson and school operations chief Frederick “Mac” Duis violated his due process rights under the U.S. Constitution.
“Essentially they kicked him out of school for something they couldn’t prove he did,” said Roanoke attorney Melvin Williams, the Bays’ lawyer.
It also accuses the Bedford County Sheriff’s Office of malicious prosecution, because Deputy M.M. Calohan, a school resource officer, filed marijuana possession charges against the boy despite field tests that indicated otherwise.
“The field test came back not inconclusive, but negative,” Williams said. “Yet she went to a magistrate and swore he possessed marijuana at school.”

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The couple said Duis ultimately rejected Wilson’s recommendation for expulsion, but instead suspended their son for 364 days. The reason Duis cited in a letter he sent later was “possession of marijuana.”

The juvenile court hearing happened late in November. When the Bays got there, Sitzler informed them that the commonwealth was going to ask for a continuance because they had neglected to send the leaf off to a state lab for testing.

Linda Bays told Sitzler they wouldn’t agree to a continuance. Sitzler went back to the prosecutor, “and she came back and said they were going to drop” the charge. That’s when the Bays learned the leaf had field-tested negative three times.

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The school system also required the boy be evaluated for substance abuse problems. So the Bays took him to his longtime pediatrician in Lynchburg, who referred them to a pediatric psychiatrist.

They said the psychiatrist told them he didn’t believe their son had a substance abuse problem. But by then, the boy had other problems. After the disciplinary hearing, “he just broke down and said his life was over. He would never be able to get into college; he would never be able to get a job,” Linda Bays said.

Now their son is skittish about going out in public, suffers from panic attacks and is depressed. The psychiatrist is treating him for that.

Today three senators—Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.)—introduced a bill that would amend the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) so that the federal ban on marijuana does not apply to people who grow, supply, or use the drug for medical purposes in compliance with state law. By eliminating the legal basis for prosecuting patients or their providers in the 23 states that allow medical use of marijuana, the Compassionate Access, Research Expansion, and Respect States (CARERS) Act would provide more protection than the Justice Department’s prosecutorial forbearance or the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, which says the DOJ may not spend money to prevent states from implementing their medical marijuana laws.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe signed off on bills Thursday allowing people with severe epilepsy to use marijuana oils to treat seizures.
The legislation came as welcome relief to Virginia Beach mom Tracie Thomas, whose son Caleb, 12, is in a clinical trial for just such a product. Thomas, Caleb and his brother Austin were on hand for the governor’s ceremonial signing.
Caleb has epilepsy and is taking Epidiolex, a liquid form of cannabis oil that a British pharmaceutical company is testing. Dr. Paul Lyons, a Winchester neurologist, received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration to treat Caleb with the marijuana oil.

They prefer, however, to dance around this fact—as Eric Holder did yesterday at the National Press Club. During the Q&A portion of his appearance, he was asked whether he would advise to president to take steps towards reclassifying marijuana, as is his prerogative under the Controlled Substances Act. Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule 1 drug, making it legally on par with far more dangerous drugs like heroin.

“I’m not sure that the underlying premise is necessarily true, I think that Congress ultimately has to do that,” Holder replied.

He followed that up with vague comments about how this is “a topic that ultimately ought to be engaged in by our nation”; how there is “a legitimate debate to be had on both sides of that question”; and how one should “take into account all the empirical evidence that we can garner to see if it is as serious a drug that would warrant Class I categorization.”

Rescheduling marijuana would not make it legal under federal law, but it would free up medical research and allow tax deductions for legal marijuana businesses. Even some groups that oppose recreational marijuana use, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, have appealed to the government to allow at least limited research on the drug’s benefits. AAP released a position paper last month calling for rescheduling.

Jails have become “de facto mental hospitals” and detox centers, the Vera Institute warns. This “is at odds with the design, operation, and resources in most jails. Characterized by constant noise, bright lights, an ever-changing population, and an atmosphere of threat and violence, most jails are unlikely to offer any respite for people with mental illness. Coupled with the near-absence of mental health treatment, time in jail is likely to mean further deterioration in their illness.”

Jennifer Stamper, Chrysalis House’s treatment director, said the mothers can stay up to two years at the facility. Chrysalis House does not offer Suboxone, but it does accept mothers who are on the medication — although Stamper said they make up less than 5 percent of the residents. Despite the clinic’s failure rate, she has not considered making the medication more accessible. “I don’t know how to answer that question,” she said. “We are an abstinence-based program by nature.”

The state’s treatment providers have little idea how their patients fare once they walk out the door. Hascal of The Healing Place said she didn’t know the relapse rate of her graduates. When Diane Hague, the director of the largest licensed addiction treatment facility in Jefferson County, was asked what happens to addicts once they leave, she replied, “How would I have that?” Right now, the surest way Hague and others know the fate of former residents is if they return after a relapse.

This is another part of the dollar$ that are involved in The War On Drugs.

For the treatment centers, the revolving door may be financially lucrative. “It’s a service that rewards the failure of the service,” Johnson said. “If you are going to a program, you don’t succeed and you pay X-thousand dollars. When you fail, you go back — another X-thousand dollars. Because it’s your fault.”

A few days ago, the Justice Department agreed to settle the case, paying her $134,000 for her troubles. As with many settlements, this one includes the government insisting that the settlement is not an admission of any guilt for its actions — though it also leaves open that Arquiett could seek to get some attorneys’ fees as well. Both Facebook and Senator Leahy had criticized the government for this action, and the DOJ promised to review this kind of practice — though that review is still “ongoing.” Either way, in this case, the DOJ realized that it was best to just pay up rather than let the case go much further.

According to Judge Steven C. Fucci, while a criminal defendant can’t be compelled to hand over a passcode to police officers for the purpose of unlocking a cellular device, law enforcement officials can compel a defendant to give up a fingerprint.

The Fifth Amendment states that “no person shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself,” which protects memorized information like passwords and passcodes, but it does not extend to fingerprints in the eyes of the law, as speculated by Wired last year.

A team of CHP officers is now under investigation for a years-long “game” in which they stole and traded private photos from the phones of women they arrested.

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It was created surreptitiously by a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who seized Prince’s phone in July 2010 after arresting her, mined it for photographs, then used those pictures to forge a fraudulent profile which allowed authorities to impersonate Prince in an investigation into an alleged New York drug ring. Until, of course, Prince found out — and sued.
The result is an ongoing New York federal civil suit that Prince, who also goes by Sandra Arquiett, has filed against the United States and DEA Agent Timothy Sinnigen. The case, which Buzzfeed’s Chris Hamby first reported, has been sent for mediation by the judge in the case. It hints at the murky boundaries of social media privacy and raises questions as to how far law enforcement can go when using new technology to investigate cases.

To all the Chicken Little government prosecutors and agents:

We don’t need protection from straw-men pedophiles or kidnappers, we need protection from The Government.

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." - Albert Camus

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